Game Review: Bee Simulator (Xbox Series X)

A fun, interesting, thought-provoking, and charming experience, Bee Simulator’s enjoyability is sadly undone by a lack of content, frustrating restrictions, and a ton of bugs that ensure the latter part of the experience is marred.

Developed by Varsav Game Studios, Bee Simulator offers players the chance to become a bee and explore a world inspired by New York’s Central Park where you can take part in bee races, collect pollen from rare flowers and defy dangerous wasps. If you’re already thinking that this doesn’t sound like much of a simulator, you’d be right, as the word and what it means is doing some heavy lifting here. You might be a bee, but there’s nothing real about this buzzy experience. Aside from some educational aspects that aims to stress the importance of our pollen-obsessed friends.

Players are a newly born bee discovering its place in the hive. Adventurous and defiant, players will become a hero bee over the course of a very short story ensuring the hive is safe for many years to come.

Completing missions, exploring the park, taking part in numerous challenges, and generally buzzing around, the early parts of Bee Simulator are great. You feel small but powerful, the park is fun to explore, and the relaxing nature of the location and gameplay is encouraging.

At least until the game’s limitations start to appear and with that, its problems. The main story is hilariously short, wrapped up within a few hours, and on a second play-through could be wrapped up in less than one. The side missions are bland and the majority of the game is made up of repetitive challenges.

Challenges like finding a certain amount of pollen from specific flowers, taking part in memory rhythm games, chasing off bullies with stings, taking part in turn-based combat against wasps, hornets, and other baddies, and races. The latter of which is easily the worst part of the entire experience. All because this game does not handle speed well, and the controls, which are a bit janky at best, become a real issue. It turns out that they are more than intuitive enough when it comes to leisurely flying around the park, but that’s about it.

Bee Simulator is not a pretty game either, with a lot of the visuals having a really muted feel and lacking detail. Something that gets worse, the closer you get. Which happens a lot, after all, you’re a bee and pretty small.

To try encourage completionists to stick with it, and to try and offer a bit of longevity, the game has feats that can be checked on the menu screen and they correlate to the achievements and trophies. Alas, this is where the issue with the more time spent with Bee Simulator, the worse it is, becomes apparent.

So many of the feats are bugged, some are extremely vague, and many may not unlock on first try or in your first play-through. Which is infuriating as there’s nothing about Bee Simulator to encourage multiple plays. Even though you can breeze through the story and get to the ‘free flight’ part of the game within an hour, it’s lost all lustre.

What began as quite charming, relaxing, fun, interesting, and thought-provoking ends up leaving an overall sour taste in the mouth. This honey might start off sweet, but it goes bad quicker than you’d think.